News/Copyright
Startup aims to pay YouTubers for AI training data
A new frontier for content creators: Calliope Networks, an AI-focused content licensing startup, is pioneering a program called "License to Scrape" that aims to revolutionize how YouTube creators can monetize their content when used for AI training. The program seeks to bridge the gap between YouTube creators and AI companies, allowing content creators to be compensated when their videos are used to train artificial intelligence systems. Unlike platforms such as Reddit, YouTube has not yet established formal agreements with AI companies for content scraping, creating an opportunity for third-party solutions. Calliope Networks' CEO, Dave Davis, envisions the program as a...
read Sep 30, 2024Gavin Newsom has rejected SB 1047 but the debate over AI safety is far from over
California Governor Vetoes Controversial AI Safety Bill: Governor Gavin Newsom has rejected a proposed legislation aimed at mitigating potential catastrophic risks associated with advanced artificial intelligence models, citing concerns over the bill's regulatory approach. SB 1047, the most contentious AI bill of the legislative session, sought to establish safeguards against the misuse of highly advanced AI systems for developing weapons of mass destruction. The bill garnered support from SAG-AFTRA and numerous Hollywood celebrities, who voiced concerns about AI's potential threats beyond the entertainment industry. Governor Newsom, while acknowledging the genuine issues addressed by the bill, expressed reservations about its regulatory...
read Sep 29, 2024Mark Zuckerberg to testify in AI copyright suit by authors
Meta CEO faces legal challenge over AI copyright infringement: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is set to be deposed in a lawsuit accusing the company of using copyrighted material without permission to train its artificial intelligence technology. A U.S. District Judge rejected Meta's attempt to prevent Zuckerberg's deposition, citing evidence of his direct involvement in the company's AI initiatives. The class action lawsuit, filed by authors including comedian Sarah Silverman, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, alleges that Meta illegally downloaded digital copies of their books for AI training purposes. Prominent attorney David Boies, known for representing...
read Sep 29, 2024An artist is suing the US Copyright Office to protect his AI-generated images
AI-generated art sparks copyright controversy: Jason Allen, a board game designer turned digital creator, is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to grant copyright protection for his AI-generated image "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial." Allen spent over 100 hours crafting 624 prompts in Midjourney, an AI image generator, to create the award-winning image depicting a futuristic royal court with women in Victorian dresses and space helmets. The image won first prize in the Colorado State Fair's digitally manipulated photography category, sparking backlash from traditional artists who accused Allen of cheating. The U.S. Copyright Office denied Allen's copyright application, citing a...
read Sep 26, 2024Zuckerberg claims creators overvalue their AI training contributions
AI training and copyright: Meta's stance on content usage: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg addresses the complex copyright issues surrounding data scraping for AI model training, suggesting that individual creators may overestimate the value of their content in this context. Zuckerberg believes that while some partnerships may be formed for particularly valuable content, Meta would generally opt not to use content if creators demanded payment or objected to its use. This approach mirrors Meta's strategy with news outlets, where the company has shown a willingness to walk away rather than pay for content it deems not valuable enough. Legal landscape and...
read Sep 20, 2024Your Favorite K-Pop Hits May Actually Be Illicit AI Clones
AI-generated music floods YouTube: A recent study by musicMagpie titled "Bop or Bot?" has uncovered a staggering 1.63 million AI-generated cover songs on YouTube, with K-pop groups bearing the brunt of this phenomenon. K-pop dominance in AI-generated content: The study reveals that K-pop artists account for 35% of the top 20 most-streamed AI-generated artists, highlighting the genre's particular vulnerability to this trend. Blackpink leads the pack with 17.3 million views of AI-generated content, followed by Justin Bieber with 13 million views, and Kanye West with 3.4 million views. This widespread proliferation of AI-generated music spans across genres and even includes...
read Sep 10, 2024MIT ‘Innovator of the Year’ Builds Tools to Help Artists Fight Exploitative AI
AI's impact on artists sparks innovative protection tools: Shawn Shan, a PhD student at the University of Chicago, has developed groundbreaking tools to help artists protect their work from AI exploitation. The generative AI boom and its consequences: The rise of image-generating AI models has led to unintended consequences for artists, raising concerns about copyright infringement and loss of work opportunities. Popular AI models like DALL-E 3, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion have been trained on vast datasets that include artists' work without their consent. Many artists have experienced a decline in job opportunities as potential clients opt for AI-generated images...
read Sep 6, 2024AI Training Violates Copyright Law, New Study Finds
Groundbreaking study reveals AI training infringes copyright: A new interdisciplinary study by computer scientist Prof. Dr. Sebastian Stober and legal scholar Prof. Dr. Tim W. Dornis concludes that training generative AI models constitutes copyright infringement under German and European law. Key findings and technological insights: The study provides unprecedented insight into the technical processes involved in training generative AI models, challenging previous assumptions about the legal implications of these practices. The research demonstrates that current generative models, including Large Language Models (LLMs) and diffusion models, can memorize and reproduce parts of their training data. This capability allows end users to...
read Sep 5, 2024YouTube’s New AI Tools Protect Creators from Voice and Face Mimicry
YouTube's new AI protection tools: YouTube is developing technologies to safeguard creators from AI-generated content that mimics their voices or likenesses, addressing growing concerns in the creative industry. The platform is creating a "synthetic-singing identification technology" to detect and manage AI-generated content that simulates artists' singing voices. This tool will be integrated into YouTube's existing Content ID copyright identification system and is scheduled for pilot testing next year. A separate tool is being developed to identify facial deepfakes of creators, actors, musicians, and athletes, though no specific release date has been announced. Responding to industry concerns: The development of these...
read Sep 4, 2024This New Organization Is Trying to Make AI Data Licensing Ethical
The formation of the Dataset Providers Alliance (DPA) marks a significant step towards ethical data licensing in the rapidly evolving AI industry, advocating for creator consent and standardized practices. A new player in AI ethics: The Dataset Providers Alliance, a trade group formed in the summer of 2024, aims to establish ethical standards and practices for data licensing in the artificial intelligence sector. Comprised of seven AI licensing companies, the DPA represents a collective effort to address the ethical concerns surrounding data usage in AI development. The alliance's primary focus is on promoting an opt-in system for data usage, ensuring...
read Sep 3, 2024Apple’s AI Web Crawler Blocked by Major Websites
AI training data controversy: Apple's web crawler for AI training, Apple-Extended, is facing widespread blocking from major websites, highlighting growing tensions in the AI industry over data access and usage. Major news publishers including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, Gannett, Vox Media, and Condé Nast have altered their robots.txt files to prevent Apple-Extended from scraping their content. Social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr, as well as Craigslist, have also confirmed blocking Apple's AI-focused web crawler. These actions reflect the increasing value and sensitivity surrounding high-quality, human-generated content for AI training purposes. Industry dynamics and partnerships:...
read Sep 2, 2024AI Training Data Shortage Looms as Websites Block Crawlers
Web crawling restrictions reshape AI training landscape: The increasing use of robots.txt files to limit web crawler access is significantly impacting the availability of high-quality training data for generative AI models, potentially altering the future development of artificial intelligence. Generative AI models, which power popular tools like ChatGPT, rely heavily on vast datasets compiled from publicly available web data. A growing number of websites, particularly news outlets and artists' pages, are implementing restrictions on web crawlers to protect their content and livelihoods from AI exploitation. The Data Provenance Initiative's recent report highlights this trend, revealing a marked increase in crawled...
read Aug 20, 2024Authors Sue Anthropic Alleging Copyright Infringement
AI copyright infringement lawsuit targets Anthropic: A group of authors has filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging copyright infringement in the training of its Claude chatbot. Key allegations: The lawsuit claims Anthropic engaged in "large-scale theft" by using pirated copies of copyrighted books to train its AI model Claude. The plaintiffs, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, are seeking to represent a class of fiction and nonfiction writers in similar situations. The lawsuit specifically points to Anthropic's use of a dataset called The Pile, which allegedly contained pirated books used in Claude's training process....
read Aug 18, 2024What the ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Philosophy Implies for the AI Industry
AI industry's contentious growth strategy: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's recent remarks at Stanford University have shed light on a controversial approach to content usage and legal compliance in the rapidly expanding AI sector. Schmidt recounted that AI startups pursue a strategy in which it is 'acceptable' to use copyrighted content without permission if it leads to success, suggesting that legal issues can be addressed later through hiring lawyers. This strategy echoes the early growth tactics of major tech companies like YouTube and Google Search, which initially used content without proper rights and dealt with legal ramifications afterward. Schmidt's candid...
read Aug 16, 2024Federal Judge Advances Landmark AI Copyright Lawsuit
The legal landscape surrounding AI-generated art is evolving as a federal judge allows key claims to proceed in a lawsuit against prominent AI art generators, potentially setting a precedent for how copyright law applies to AI systems trained on internet data. Legal breakthrough for artists: A federal judge has permitted copyright infringement and trademark claims to move forward in a lawsuit filed by artists against AI art generators including Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt. The lawsuit centers on the LAION dataset, which allegedly contains 5 billion scraped images used to train AI models like Stable Diffusion. The judge found that...
read Aug 13, 2024Artists Gain Ground in AI Copyright Lawsuits
AI copyright lawsuit advances: A federal judge has allowed key claims in a lawsuit against several AI companies to proceed, marking a significant development in the ongoing legal battles over AI-generated art and copyright infringement. The legal landscape: The lawsuit, filed by a group of artists against AI companies including Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI, has gained traction as some claims were permitted to move forward while others were dismissed. The judge allowed a claim of induced copyright infringement against Stability AI to proceed, potentially setting a precedent for how AI companies may be held responsible for the...
read Aug 12, 2024Artists Celebrate as Copyright Case Reaches New Milestone
The ongoing legal battle between artists and AI image generation companies has reached a significant milestone, with potential far-reaching implications for the AI industry and copyright law. Legal breakthrough for artists: A federal judge has ruled that a copyright infringement case against prominent AI image generation companies can proceed to the discovery phase, marking a crucial development in the ongoing debate over AI and intellectual property rights. The case, filed in January 2023, targets Midjourney, Runway, Stability AI, and DeviantArt, alleging that their AI image generators, based on the Stable Diffusion model, were trained on copyrighted works without proper authorization....
read Aug 8, 2024ProRata is Pioneering a Pay-Per-Use Data Sales Model to Solve AI’s Copyright Woes
The emergence of AI pay-per-use models aims to address copyright concerns in generative AI by ensuring fair compensation for content creators and publishers whose work is used to train AI systems. ProRata's innovative approach: Bill Gross, CEO of startup ProRata, is spearheading an "AI pay-per-use" model to tackle the issue of AI companies using copyrighted data without permission. ProRata's primary goal is to establish revenue-sharing agreements that allow publishers and individuals to receive compensation when AI companies utilize their work. The company has already secured partnerships with major players in the media and publishing industry, including Universal Music Group, Financial...
read Aug 7, 2024Copyright Office Seeks Votes for SXSW Panels on Creative Business Growth
U.S. Copyright Office seeks public support for SXSW 2025 panel proposals: The Copyright Office is calling for votes on two proposed panels for the upcoming South by Southwest (SXSW) 2025 conference, aiming to educate the creative community on copyright protection and business growth. Voting process and timeline: The public can participate in the panel selection process by voting on proposals from August 6 to August 18, 2024. Interested individuals can vote by clicking on the panel titles, creating a free account, and giving an "upvote" to the preferred proposals. The Copyright Office encourages voters to support both of their proposed...
read Aug 7, 2024Tech Leaders Demand Overhaul of U.S. Copyright Laws, AI Upskilling
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technologies is prompting tech industry leaders to call for significant updates to U.S. copyright laws and regulatory frameworks, according to a recent survey by The Harris Poll for Collibra. Overwhelming support for copyright law reform: A striking 84% of data, privacy, and AI decision-makers believe U.S. copyright laws should be updated to address challenges posed by artificial intelligence. This strong majority highlights the growing recognition within the tech industry that existing legal frameworks may be inadequate to handle the complexities introduced by AI technologies. The high level of support suggests a sense of urgency...
read Aug 5, 2024How AI Tools are Reshaping Media Production
The big picture: Artificial intelligence is forcing the media production industry to adapt, with both tech giants and innovative startups developing tools that streamline processes, enhance creativity, and democratize content creation. AI-powered technologies are being applied across various aspects of media production, including animation, film dubbing, video editing, music composition, and content distribution. These advancements are making high-quality content production more efficient and accessible to a broader range of creators, potentially revolutionizing the media landscape. As AI's capabilities expand, the line between human and machine creativity is becoming increasingly blurred, raising questions about the future of artistic expression and the...
read Aug 5, 2024Leaked Docs Expose Nvidia’s Massive AI Data Grab From YouTube
The big picture: Recent leaks expose Nvidia's extensive efforts to collect vast amounts of online video content for AI training purposes, raising questions about the scale and ethics of data acquisition in the AI industry. Leaked Slack conversations and emails reveal Nvidia employees discussing plans to scrape videos from popular platforms like YouTube and Netflix for AI training. The scope of the project appears to extend beyond mere research purposes, suggesting a more comprehensive data collection strategy. Project managers outlined plans to utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure to download an astonishing 80 years' worth of video content per day....
read Aug 2, 2024AI Music Startups Defend Copyright Infringement, Arguing Fair Use in Landmark Lawsuits
The AI music startups Suno and Udio are pushing back against copyright infringement lawsuits filed by major record labels, arguing that training their AI models on copyrighted material falls under fair use and that the lawsuits aim to stifle competition in the music industry. The RIAA's accusations: The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing major record labels, filed lawsuits against Suno and Udio in June, alleging massive copyright infringement: The RIAA claims that some tracks generated by Suno and Udio contain vocals sounding identical to famous artists like Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, and ABBA. The lawsuits seek damages of...
read Aug 1, 2024AI Music Startup Suno Challenges Copyright Law in Landmark Lawsuit
Boston-Based AI startup Suno is asserting its right to use copyrighted music to train its AI models that generate new songs, arguing that this practice does not violate copyright law and is protected under fair use provisions. Legal Precedent and Fair Use: Suno's legal team draws parallels to a previous case where Google was allowed to create a searchable index of millions of books without infringing on publishers' copyrights, setting a precedent for using copyrighted material to develop new products: The company argues that training AI models on copyrighted music to generate new, original songs falls under fair use, as...
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